Dark Storm Team, a Pro-Palestinian Group, Claims Responsibility for Massive Cyberattack on X, Causing Multiple Outages

The hacking group Dark Storm Team has claimed responsibility for a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on the social media platform X, causing multiple outages throughout the day. The group announced their involvement via a Telegram post, which included Cyrillic letters, stating they successfully disrupted the platform's services. Dark Storm Team is known for its pro-Palestinian stance and has a history of targeting entities associated with Israel and its allies. The group collaborates with pro-Russian hackers and has claimed responsibility for attacks on other critical infrastructures, including the Los Angeles International Airport, the port of Haifa in Israel, and the UAE's Ministry of Defense, according to cybersecurity vendor SOCRadar. Elon Musk, the owner of X, confirmed the platform was under a massive cyberattack, suggesting it was executed with significant resources, possibly by a large coordinated group or a nation-state. Musk mentioned that X faces daily attacks, but the scale of this incident was notably larger. According to Downdetector, the outages began around 5 a.m. ET, with a peak of 21,000 reports, followed by another spike at 9 a.m. ET with over 40,000 users affected, and a third wave around 11 a.m. with over 35,000 users reporting issues. The latest outage appeared to resolve around 1:30, but issues resurfaced. Musk stated that his team is 'tracing' the source of the attack, as reported by Newsweek.